Texas Learns You Can’t Be Laissez Faire About Licensing Plumbers

In May, this year’s session of the Texas legislature ended in chaotic fashion with a confusing series of late-night votes. After the gavel fell, lawmakers—who meet only once every two years in a state resistant to the trammels of politics—realized they’d failed to renew the law authorizing the State Board of Plumbing Examiners. Created in 1947 to ensure clean and safe water for the Lone Star State, the plumbers’ licensing board has been a powerful authority. Every aspiring plumber has needed to make a pilgrimage to Austin to win the right to practice. Suddenly, with a nonstroke of the pen, anyone could do it.

Texas has always taken a laissez-faire attitude toward its biggest industries, including real estate (Houston is the largest U.S. city without zoning rules) and energy (streamlined permits helped create the world’s largest oil field). In the wake of the licensing debacle, Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican who made his reputation fighting off rules imposed by Washington, found himself confronting a coalition of working-class tradespeople and well-heeled builders who argued that amateurs would endanger their fellow Texans, not to mention their own livelihoods.